The Marxist historian and peace campaigner E. P. Thompson (1924–1993), the outstanding voice of the Cold War, is perhaps best known for his book The Making of the English Working Class (1963). But if Marx was one of his heroes, William Blake was another. Like Blake, Thompson was fascinated by the revolutionary possibilities of Christian theology, treating it less as revealed truth and more as a political fable. What he found attractive in Christianity was what had interested the radical Dissenters – not so much reverence for its system of spiritual belief as respect for its resistance to tyrannical oppression.
Thompson shared Blake’s ambivalence about Christianity. He regarded it as a movement poised between the radical and the reactionary: sometimes comfortable with the rich and powerful, sometimes tapping into deep revolutionary unrest. In “Nativity”, for example, first published in the TLS in 1973 and then – retitled “Lamentation in Rama” – in Infant and Emperor (1983), a collection of eleven poems privately printed as a Christmas gift for friends, Thompson’s focus is on power and powerlessness. Here, the Christian myth is treated as little more than another mechanism of social control, along with the judiciary and the military; “Who”, the poet asks with savage irony, “will preserve the poor / From visitations of God / From the law’s solicitations / And the carnal lust of the drum?” Better not to force the ruling class to make an example of those who challenge them (“Who was she to bring down / Herod about their heads”); or, even more revealingly, make the Church itself take sides in the conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed.
Nativity
Out of a sin
Scarcely original
A common pregnancy with all
The graceless discomforts
Of an upright animal –
Cherries her only craving,
And a hard lying-in –
Blood and waters broke
Of metaphysical war:
Nor was her labour done
Until that parturition when
Caesarean surgery
Delivered from the swollen state
Her son slain by the law.
It had been better for us
If she had held her peace.
Only a trivial fuss
Exacerbates authority’s
Impartial equilibrium:
A stirring in the womb
Alerts the testy police.
Surely she must have known
The gracious powers above
Keep watch on the little streets?
Someone was bound to inform.
The law was in need of delinquents;
The cross craved for meat.
The least suspicion of love –
Instant retaliation,
Trumpeters, taxes on salt,
Smoking settlements,
Folk dragged from their beds.
And what of the innocents?
Who was she to bring down
Herod about their heads?
Who will preserve the poor
From visitations of God,
From the law’s solicitations
And the carnal lust of the drum?
Who will deliver them from
Evil consecutive upon
The contagion of the good?
E. P. THOMPSON (1973)
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